1. Of course we can have a consensus. That is what the assessment represents. There are issues on which agreement could not be reached, where the evidence did not support conclusions, etc, and those issues were noted as such. The list of research yet to do to answer those outstanding questions was in every technical summary.

2. The unfortunately named hockey stick was NOT "quietly withdrawn". Science has progressed, as it always does, and refined versions with better data and better analysis methods have since been published. The conclusions, however, have not changed.